IRC vs Planet Perl Iron Man

IRC

I’m pretty introverted so IRC isn’t an ideal medium for me – it’s a direct conversation. Conversely, having a blog posted on PPIM sometime gets the message1 out to the important people and there is little need to interact with people directly ;) For me, PPIM is better than IRC.

Malicious or Careless Users

“the code does assume that we’re all honest and nice people and that we’ll use good tags and the correct date”

In this case, I’d assume it was user error rather than a deliberate and somewhat annoying attempt to monopolise the top of PPIM. Having said that, whenever I’ve needed to develop a webfacing app, I’ve noticed that assuming your users are going to play nice is the wrong thing to do. If even one of your thousands of users is malicious and effective, it’s going to ruin your day.

If I was responsible for implementing Planet Ironman, I wouldn’t have planned for a future dated post either. But having seen it, it should be fairly simple to discard any post with a date more than 1 day into the future.

1. In this case, the message wasn’t really important so finding the appropriate delivery channel didn’t really matter.